As Serbia’s ruling party readies to stage a major rally on Saturday in an attempt to overshadow student-led anti-government protests, public sector employees are reportedly being pressured to attend.
Gordana Andric
Belgrade city central streets were closed on Friday ahead of a rally that the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, is organising on Saturday under the slogan “Serbia, one family”.
The party’s leaders are set to present their goals, plans and programmes at the gathering “for the future of the country”, the SNS said.
The party has been in power since 2012 but in the past two years has faced its greatest political challenge from student-led mass protests. It has held a series of its own street rallies in response.
“I believe we will deliver important messages at the event, and you will hear about the ideas and goals we have … We will also unveil the largest Serbian flag ever displayed. Our sacred tricolour serves as a reminder to everyone that the flag and the coat-of-arms stand above all of us,” Milos Vucevic, the party president, told the news agency Tanjug.
The Progressive Party rally is being staged just a day before an anti-government protest in the central town of Kraljevo on Sunday.
Serbia has been engulfed by an ongoing series of protests since 16 people died when the external canopy at the recently renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed in November 2024. The tragedy has been widely blamed on corruption and negligence by the authorities.
However, President Aleksandar Vucic claimed this week that the protesters are trying to “overthrow and destroy our state” while the SNS is trying to “preserve peace, tolerance and show patience”.
Boban Stanojevic, from Belgrade University’s Faculty of Political Science, predicted that Vucic might well announce some populist move at the rally, like his previous announcement of cheap loans for young people to buy apartments.
However, Stojanovic believes the rally’s main purpose is to take the wind out of the sails of a student-led protest set for June 28, which is also an important religious holiday in Serbia marking the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.
“I would say Vucic lost that race in numbers, about who can gather larger crowds, a long time ago. But the propaganda machinery is spinning it, of course,” he told BIRN.
Roads cordoned off in central Belgrade ahead of the SNS’s rally. Photo: BIRN.People mobilised by the SNS have started marching towards the Belgrade rally from all over the country in what political experts say is a regime attempt to mimic the students’ movement, the driving force behind the ongoing anti-government protests. Students have been marching across the country to attend major protests since they began.
“This is vague copy of the creative youth – that is what the Progressives are trying to do in this campaign. But what is good news for Serbia is that the public is not buying it,” Stojanovic said.
In the weeks leading up to the SNS rally, some public sector workers have complained to media and trade unions of the pressures they are facing to attend the rally.
Ranka Savic, president of the Association of Free and Independent Unions, ASNS, told media outlet N1 that the pressure has intensified due to what she called the government’s determination to bring more people to this rally than the SNS ever has before.
Savic said all the main public companies have received quotas on how many workers they must bring to the rally, and directors are under pressure even to mobilise staff who are not SNS members.
BIRN reported in December that hundreds of people across Serbia have lost their jobs after supporting student-led protests, or refusing to attend SNS counter-rallies.
